Oliver
Goldsmiths The Rising Village

by Kenneth J. Hughes

I

The best
available criticism of Oliver Goldsmiths The Rising Village is to be
found in The Goldsmiths and Their Villages, an article of 1951 by Desmond
Pacey,1 and in the economical statement by Fred
Cogswell in the Literary History of Canada.2
These works of criticism are not without their problems, however, for they fail to
perceive both the functional significance of the Flora and Albert section of the poem and
the implications of the removal of certain telling first edition passages from the second
edition. These omissions and the over-emphasis on the elder Goldsmiths The
Deserted Village as model lead to other difficulties.

Professor Pacey offers a comparative analysis of The Rising Village and its
predecessor-model, The Deserted Village, by the Canadian poets Irish
namesake and great-uncle. He notes the similarity of the general structure of each work
and observes that the Canadian poem is 132 lines longer (p. 27). This extension he
attributes to the addition of the Flora and Albert story to the Canadian poem, for which
there is no equivalent in The Deserted Village. But that the structures of the
two works are similar except for the Flora and Albert story surely suggests that the
latter must be of some great since, for the Canadian Goldsmith must have had some
compelling reason for departing from his model when he inserted the Flora and Albert
story, as indeed he had.

For
Professor Pacey the Canadian poem is decidedly inferior to its Irish ancestor because it
lacks the Wit and passion (p. 28) of that work. Indeed, he proceeds to say,
The Canadian Goldsmith . . . appears to have felt passionately about nothing: he
neither hates nor loves with any of his uncles vehemence. The latters
diatribes against luxury and the tyranny of wealth have . . . no counterpart in The
Rising Village (p. 29). The latter part of this statement is unquestionably true
as any examination of the text will quickly verify. It by no means follows, however, that
the alleged cause, the supposed lack of wit and passion, is characteristic of Goldsmith
the man. Goldsmith undoubtedly knew what every eighteenth-century rhetorician knew, that
an approach must generally be in some way acceptable to the audience for which a work is
intended, and therefore a literary art object is by no means necessarily a measure of the
passion an individual writer actually brings to a particular subject.

But
there is a yet more compelling reason for the difference of emotional intensity between
the two works and this is indicated by the titles themselves, The Rising
Village and The Deserted Village. The Canadian work is a success story
written from the point of view of the ruling oligarchy in Halifax; the elder
Goldsmiths poem is a story of failure by a member of the Tory class in Britain which
is threatened by the rise of industrialism and new social forces. The Canadian looks on
with satisfied pleasure (despite some problems), while the Irishman inveighs against the
wretched developments in what is for him an increasingly vile world. His passions and
invective  and wit  can be explained readily enough by the
socio-economic developments that gave rise to them. Similarly, the Canadian
Goldsmiths position can be explained by the different situation in Nova Scotia.
There is no point in bemoaning the absence of qualities in the one work which are present
in the other because different conditions gave rise to each. Both works distort empirical
facts to give birth to what each writer considered to be the essential truth. For the
elder Goldsmith this took the form of an outraged pessimism, for the younger, a satisfied
optimism. If the elder Goldsmith prematurely indicted socio-economic developments that led
to rural depopulation, he nonetheless anticipated what was going to happen; and if the
younger Goldsmith glosses over some of the problems in Nova Scotia (by no means all of
them) in his optimistic portrait of the province, it still remains that Nova Scotia was
a success story and his account of its rise is essentially correct.

Another
criticism by Professor Pacey of the Canadian poem is that it falls short of the
style of its model . . . in its relative lack of specific detail (p. 34). Written in
accordance with eighteenth-century conventions which emphasized the universal, the tulip
rather than the stripes on the tulip, we would not expect an abundance of detail.
Moreover, notwithstanding the similarity of structure between The Rising
Village and The Deserted Village, the two works do not properly belong
to the same genre.

A little later Professor
Pacey quotes a few lines from the poem:

As
thus the village each successive year
Presents new
prospects, and extends its sphere,
While all around
its smiling charms expand,
And rural beauties
decorate the land.

Of these he remarks: This
last passage has the air of being written by rote: it is a bit of padding which adds
nothing to our understanding of the village (p. 31). There are two main problems
here. First, far from being redundant, this passage is thoroughly functional in terms of
the development of the poems and it is therefore not padding. The abstract and universal
rather than concrete new prospects, extends, sphere,
and expand constitute essential parts of a sequence of deliberate repetitions
(sometimes incremental) to remind us of the constant expansion of Nova Scotia in the
process of growth. Second, we are not primarily interested in this poem with any
understanding of the village as such. The village, like the characters, is typical,
and it is intended to represent all the rising villages in the colony, and thus it is
intended to represent the whole of Nova Scotia. This is why we move from the first hut at
the beginning of the poem to a fully developed Nova Scotia at the end. And it is precisely
because the village is all the villages in a rising Nova Scotia that Goldsmith avoids
detail and emphasizes universality through appropriate diction.

Professor Paceys comparison of character types and his preference for the English
schoolmaster in The Deserted Village, rather than the type in The Rising
Village, is difficult to understand. He writes: Both schoolmasters are types,
but the English schoolmaster is much more of a recognizable person than his Canadian
counterpart (p. 34). The Canadian schoolmaster emerges, in fact, as a type generally
in keeping with McCullochs schoolmaster in Stepsure Letters.3 Moreover, the Canadian Goldsmith has set himself a much more
difficult task than his ancestor as he attempts to outline his Canadian schoolmaster, for
not only does he deliberately echo the elder Goldsmith as he creates the antithesis of the
English schoolmaster, but he proceeds to offer us a Canadian type as well.

The
point of these comments is not to set the scene for a claim that the Canadian Goldsmith is
better than his ancestor. To do that would be to go to the other extreme of Professor
Paceys position (as it was, that is, twenty years ago). The object is rather to
suggest that the comparative approach is satisfactory up to a point, but beyond that point
it prevents us from understanding the Canadian work in its own right. For while the
Canadian Goldsmith consciously works in the tradition of his ancestors, he transforms that
tradition in the light of Canadian needs. The Rising Village will not replace Paradise
Lost in the aesthetic pecking order, but it still be further up the line than
Professor Pacey was inclined to believe in 1951.

Professor Cogswell makes three points about The Rising Village that need
to be questioned and modified. First, he states that When The Rising Village:
A Poem appeared in London in 1825, Goldsmith became so disappointed by the
invidious comparisons that English critics made with his great-uncles work that he
lost all further interest in poetic composition. He did, however, re-issue the poem, along
with a few occasional pieces, in a volume entitled The Rising Village, with
Other Poems, published in Saint John, in 1834 (p. 120). In fact a good deal more
than personal disappointment at the reception of his poem in London was involved. His
poetical disappointment was matched by and concurrent with political disappointment, and
this led to a shift in political consciousness so that from an ardent proponent of the
mercantile imperial system Goldsmith became aware of, and probably a party to, an
incipient Nova Scotia nationalism;4 evidence for
these views can be found in an examination of the major differences between the 1825 and
1834 editions.

Professor Cogswells second point is that the poem falls basically into three parts,
and Sandwiched between and bearing little organic relation to either part is the
pathetic story of Flora and Albert (p. 120). The argument here will be twofold: that
an understanding of the function of the story of Flora and Albert is central to an
understanding of The Rising Village and that the story is an integral part of
the whole work. In certain respects it is like the story of Leonora in Henry
Fieldings Joseph Andrews, but instead of offering a parallel story within a
main plot to enforce his moral as Fielding does, Goldsmith moves to allegory because he is
dealing with politically dangerous material.

Professor Cogswells third point is in reference to poetic technique: In his
skilful use of balance and antithesis, Goldsmith demonstrates how carefully he had studied
his great-uncles work. Unfortunately, he borrowed tamely every conceivable trite
phrase and hackneyed rhyme that had found its way into the eighteenth-century British
couplet. As a result, his otherwise respectable lines are studded with
clichés (p. 120). These judgements can only be modified by reference to poetry and
politics, or rather what may be called the politics of poetry. In the absence of serious
studies of the social basis in Britain for the relationship between the orderly couplet
poetic form (why it was dominant and admired) and he generalized desire for order
characteristic of the period, together with the prevalence of the admired and ubiquitous
presence of antithesis, the answer to Professor Cogswells criticism can only be
sketchy. Yet it can surely be no accident that the eighteenth century was the period which
saw the consolidation in Britain for the first time of opposing political parties to
create a union of opposites within the parliamentary framework. Nor can it be an accident
that these parties were the expression in politics of a union of opposites in the economic
sphere between a Tory landed class and Whig mercantile capitalists. If there was strict
order and tension in the poetry, there was also strict order and tension in the daily
political and economic life of the country.

When
Goldsmith wrote, this socio-economic and political balance had been destroyed in Britain
by the rise of laissez-faire industrial capitalism, and in this process the hegemony of
the couplet had been upset in poetry. But this had not yet happened in Canada. The society
which Goldsmith describes is one in which the eighteenth-century British situation still
obtains, for Nova Scotia was still controlled by landed and mercantile interests. It seems
reasonable to suggest, therefore, that Goldsmith uses the couplet form because, with its
balance and antithesis, it constitutes a poetical form appropriate to a society in which
political power consists of a union of opposites in the alliance between landed Tory and
mercantile Whig interests. That is to say, since order and tension were characteristic of
his audiences daily experience, the same qualities in the literature would lead his
audience to accept works in the couplet form as reflections of what was real. If
Goldsmith learned the technique of balance and antithesis in the couplet form from his
great-uncle, it was because he found it a congenial form in the first place. If he found
it to be congenial, it was because it was appropriate both to the structure of the Nova
Scotia society about which he wrote (i.e., what his audience expected) and to the
structure of his own mind. We might go further and suggest that if Goldsmith had been able
to write his work in blank verse, he would have been unable to communicate with his Nova
Scotian brethren. In other words, although there would have been a first edition in
London, there would not have been a second Canadian edition.

In the
light of the somewhat sketchy considerations it seems reasonable to say that while
Goldsmith learned from his great-uncles work  and that of others  he was
not simply a slavish imitator; rather he was working in a tradition which was accepted and
expected by the audience of his time in Nova Scotia. That his work was not a success in
England in the first edition of 1825 can be explained by the socio-economic industrial
revolution which had destroyed the eighteenth-century conditions which in turn had given
rise to the heroic couplet.

Professor Cogswell alleges that Goldsmith borrowed phrases from the eighteenth-century
British couplet. To begin to put this allegation in its proper perspective we must refer
to the doctrines of poetic diction and poetic kinds, although it must be observed that, in
the absence of a fully annotated edition of The Rising Village, the case for
extensive borrowing has not yet been proved. While there was no Academy along the lines of
the French Academy in England in the eighteenth century, the rules for the writing of
poetry were as well known as if there had been. Tillotson observes that the heroic couplet
became the most precise metre ever used in English verse5 and the kinds of poetry were still
seen as distinct, and as requiring the use of different kinds of diction (p. 24).
Berger argues that such academic rules schematize and inhibit the artists
imagination before he even begins towork.6
Thus, eighteenth-century British poetic theory constitutes an a priori
concept of poetry for Goldsmith; he knows in general what he will do before he does it.We can therefore expect a similarity between his diction and eighteenth-century
British poetic diction. How many phrases are merely similar and how many literally
borrowed we cannot know at the present time. But we do know that Goldsmith was limited in
his choice of diction by the rules governing the kind of poetry he wrote. Tillotson
remarks that, When writing satire the eighteenth-century poet chose his words as
freely as any poet. The art, passion, and invective of the elder Goldsmiths
The Deserted Village seems to belong here. However, when writing an epic
pastoral, and georgic the eighteenth-century poet was not so free (p. 28). The
Rising Village seems to belong here. Goldsmith could not freely choose his diction
because he was not writing satire; he was writing according to the rules. He was
writing according to the rules because his subject (and audience) was a society with the
same political and economic power structure and the same poetic expectations as obtained
in Britain in the eighteenth century, out of which the poetic rules had sprung (or been
adapted from the French). Goldsmiths acceptance of the rules implies an acceptance
of the political power structure, although his attitude is by no means unquestioning.

The
critics find The Rising Village to be beset with problems and these problems
are said to be the cause of the works failure. However, if we approach the poem from
a different angle, we shall be able to see that The Rising Village, in fact,
is a coherent poetic structure in which the Flora and Albert story has a functional part.
Moreover, we shall also be able to account for the major textual changes7 between the 1825 and 1834 editions, changes about which the
critics are silent. The text employed here will be that of 1834 for the simple reason that
it is the most Canadian of the two and the one most employed by critics.

II

The Rising Village8 seems to be a
very simple poem at first glance. It starts with conventional invocations and moves on to
a brief description of the mother country, England. From this point it offers an account
of the history of the settlement of Nova Scotia and of the growth of the village of the
title. We start with savage Indians, see nature gradually tamed and crops grow. We watch
the appearance of the tavern, church, general store, and schoolhouse, together with the
pedlar who turns merchant, the half-bred doctor, and the teacher. We are told of country
sports and of the sad (and, as some think, silly and digressive) story of Flora and
perfidious Albert which takes up about one fifth of the work. Albert, noble, kind,
and free, meets Flora on the green in summer and offers vows of
love. Winter having arrived, the bridal dress was made and all is set
for the wedding. At this point Albert sends a letter saying that he cannot marry her and
that he has gone away. With her reason fled, Flora dashes out into the setting
sun and the cold snow where she collapses to be saved next morning by a poor
peasant whose wife nurses Flora back to health. The poem closes with the now
viable community that is Nova Scotia presented as a good child of mother Britain. The
general effect of this superficial reading is that of a concatenation of vignettes that
moves us across time.

The poem
opens with an address to the poets brother, Henry, the person to whom the dedicatory
letter of the 1825 edition was also addressed: